From: Lyle Johnson <lyle@...>
Date: 2002-08-23T07:37:19+09:00
Subject: Re: Tk and Gtk

Robert Warning wrote:
> Okay this isn't exactly a ruby question, but in the near future I want 
> to do a GUI aplication in ruby. Now  two obvious choices that come to 
> mind are tk and gtk. To me tk looks a bit dated (graphics wise not 
> functionally). For instance the new netscape browser look like it was 
> done with Tk (probably valid since Aol owns netscape and they seem to 
> love Tcl/Tk) and it looks kinda ugly.

Actually, Netscape (a.k.a. Mozilla) is using its own 
platform-independent GUI toolkit (XUL).

> But it has pretty darned easy to 
> learn a great deal about it because I looked in the Perl/Tk book by 
> O'Reilly and it seems pretty straight forward translation from Perl to 
> Ruby. But GTK looks more modern (again graphics wise) and apealling to 
> the eye. Also the tutorial presented for Ruby/GTK is very helpfull. Plus 
> I have had a bit of experience with PHP-GTK (not enough to do much 
> usefull). My question is what are the major pros and cons of Tk and GTK. 
> Sorry if that was a bit off the ruby topic but I didn't know where to ask.

Regular readers of the comp.lang.ruby newsgroup know what I'm going to 
get around to eventually, so let me start by presenting some less-biased 
links from the RubyGarden Wiki:

* Conrad Schneiker's "Summary Favoring GTK+"

	http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?SummaryFavoringGTK

* Kevin Smith's "GTK vs. Tk"

	http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?GTKvsTk

* "Comparing GUI Toolkits" (with contributions from many)

	http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?ComparingGuiToolkits

Although all three of these pages are a bit old by now, most of the 
comments you'll see in them still apply. As you've noted, the general 
consensus about Tk is that:

+ it is very cross-platform, with ports to Mac OS as well as Windows and 
Linux;
+ it is very well-documented (if not for Ruby/Tk specifically, at least 
for Perl/Tk);
- its look is pretty dated

As for GTK+, the big sticking point seems to be the wobbly support for 
Windows. This was supposed to have improved for the GTK+ 2.0 release but 
I get the impression that nothing's changed; the Windows version still 
seems to be a second-class citizen with one person doing the job. But I 
don't use it regularly and I may be way off on this assessment.

You don't mention which platform(s) you're targeting for your 
application. If you're only targeting Linux (well, let's instead say 
"X-Windows platforms") and you're already familiar with GTK+ from other 
environments it seems like an obvious choice: go with Ruby/GTK. It seems 
to be pretty well-maintained. If you know that you'll need to run your 
application on Mac OS eventually, go with Ruby/Tk instead.

A more recent arrival on the scene is FXRuby (http://www.fxruby.org), 
the Ruby bindings for the FOX GUI toolkit (http://www.fox-toolkit.org). 
I am very biased because this is the project I'm working on. But, as it 
turns out, a lot of people have found it to be a good alternative to 
Ruby/Tk and Ruby/GTK for a number of reasons. It has a very modern 
look-and-feel and is actively supported for both Windows and Linux/X. 
The number one biggest problem (IMO) is the shortage of documentation.

Hope this helps,

Lyle